YouTube Search Scraper

What is YouTube Search Scraper?

YouTube Search Scraper searches YouTube by keyword and returns videos with exact numbers, ISO 8601 timestamps, and 37 fields per video — ready for spreadsheets, dashboards, and analysis pipelines.

No API key required. No quota limits.

Every number is an exact integer. Every date is ISO 8601. No "1.2M" guesses, no "10 months ago" approximations.

Data points extracted per video

Field	Description	Example
videoId	YouTube video ID	dQw4w9WgXcQ
title	Video title	Best Restaurants in NYC 2026
publishedAt	ISO 8601 upload timestamp	2026-03-15T14:30:00Z
viewCount	Exact view count	2450891
likeCount	Exact like count	89234
commentCount	Exact comment count	4521
duration	ISO 8601 duration	PT12M45S
durationSeconds	Duration in seconds	765
tags	Video tags	nyc,restaurants,food
categoryId	YouTube category ID	19
categoryName	Human-readable category	Travel & Events
definition	Video quality	hd
type	Video type	video / shorts
channelName	Channel display name	NYC Foodie
channelSubscriberCount	Exact subscriber count	850000
channelIsVerified	Verification badge	true

37 fields per video. Every number exact. Every date ISO 8601.

Why use this scraper?

Our Actor vs Top YouTube Search Actors

Feature	Us	API Ninja	Grow Media
Price per 1,000 results	$0.50	$2.50	$1.00
viewCount exact integer	✅	✅	✅
likeCount exact integer	✅	❌	✅
commentCount exact integer	✅	❌	✅
subscriberCount exact integer	✅	❌ abbreviated	❌ abbreviated
tags	✅	❌	✅
categoryId	✅	❌	❌
topicDetails	✅	❌	❌
definition (HD/SD)	✅	❌	❌
hasCaptions	✅	❌	❌
isAgeRestricted	✅	❌	❌
durationSeconds integer	✅	❌	✅
Sort by relevance/date/views/rating	✅	✅	❌
Multiple queries per run	✅	❌	❌
Channel info per result	✅	❌	❌
No API key required	✅	❌ needs key	✅

• One row, full picture — 37 fields per video, flat CSV. No second API call, no post-processing to parse "1.2K" into a number. Download, open in Excel, done.
• Incremental delivery — Results appear in your dataset within seconds. Export anytime, don't wait for the run to finish.
• From $0.50 per 1,000 items — Volume discounts down to $0.25 on Business plan.

Use cases

• Market research — Search for products, brands, or industries to understand what content exists, what gets views, and what gaps remain. Build datasets for reports with exact numbers.
• Content discovery — Find videos on any topic sorted by relevance, upload date, view count, or rating. Discover trending content and emerging creators.
• Trend analysis — Track search results over time for specific keywords. Monitor how video performance and content mix change week to week.
• Competitor monitoring — Search for competitor brand names, product names, or industry keywords. See who's creating content, what's ranking, and what's getting engagement.
• Ad targeting — Find videos by keyword that are monetized, have captions, and match your target audience demographics. Filter by channel size and engagement ratios.
• ML training data — Structured JSON with 37 fields per video, ready for recommendation systems, content classification, or search relevance modeling.

How much does it cost?

Each video in search results counts as one item.

Plan	Price per 1,000 items
Free	$0.50
Starter	$0.45
Scale	$0.40
Business	$0.25

Scenario	Items	Cost
1 query, 20 results	20	$0.01
5 queries, 50 results each	250	$0.13
20 queries, 100 results each	2,000	$1.00
100 queries, 200 results each	20,000	$10.00

Apify also charges a small compute cost (CU) for the actor's runtime — typically under $0.01 for most runs.

Supported sort options

Sort	Description
relevance	YouTube's default ranking (most relevant first)
date	Most recently uploaded first
view_count	Most viewed first
rating	Highest rated first

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	string[]	required	YouTube search terms. Each query runs a separate search.
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	20	Maximum videos to return per search query.
sortBy	string	relevance	relevance, date, view_count, or rating.
language	string	en	ISO 639-1 language code for search results.
country	string	US	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code for search results.

Output example

Each item in the dataset is a single video:

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "title": "Best Restaurants in NYC 2026 — Full Guide",
  "description": "We tried 50 restaurants across all five boroughs to find the best...",
  "descriptionLinks": "https://nycfoodie.com/guide",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dQw4w9WgXcQ/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-15T14:30:00Z",
  "duration": "PT12M45S",
  "durationSeconds": 765,
  "viewCount": 2450891,
  "likeCount": 89234,
  "commentCount": 4521,
  "tags": "nyc,restaurants,food,best restaurants",
  "categoryId": 19,
  "categoryName": "Travel & Events",
  "topicDetails": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restaurant",
  "definition": "hd",
  "hasCaptions": true,
  "isAgeRestricted": false,
  "privacyStatus": "public",
  "commentsTurnedOff": false,
  "hashtags": "#nyc #restaurants #foodie",
  "type": "video",
  "searchQuery": "restaurants in NYC",
  "searchRank": 0,
  "order": 0,
  "channelId": "UCabc123def456ghi789jkl",
  "channelName": "NYC Foodie",
  "channelUsername": "@NYCFoodie",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCabc123def456ghi789jkl",
  "channelDescription": "Exploring the best food in New York City...",
  "channelCountry": "US",
  "channelJoinedAt": "2019-06-10T12:00:00Z",
  "channelSubscriberCount": 850000,
  "channelTotalViews": 245000000,
  "channelTotalVideos": 312,
  "channelAvatarUrl": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/...",
  "channelBannerUrl": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/...",
  "channelIsVerified": true,
  "scrapeTimestamp": "2026-04-02T12:00:00Z"
}

Download your results as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML from the dataset tab, or access them via the Apify API.

Good to know

No API key required. Just enter your search terms and get results. No YouTube API key needed, no quota limits, no rate limiting headaches.

Subscriber counts are exact integers. Other scrapers return abbreviated text like "1.2M" that you have to parse. We return 1200000 — ready for calculations, sorting, and filtering.

Channel info is included by default. Every result row includes full channel metadata (subscribers, description, country, etc.) so your CSV is self-contained. No second API call needed.

Multiple queries in one run. Pass an array of search queries and get results for all of them in a single dataset. Each result includes searchQuery so you can group and filter.

Integrations

Connect this actor to your workflow with Apify integrations:

• Make (Integromat) — trigger workflows when new data is available
• Zapier — push videos to Google Sheets, Slack, or databases
• GitHub — store results in repositories
• Google Drive — export directly to spreadsheets
• Webhooks — notify your API when the run completes
• Apify API — programmatic access for custom pipelines

Legal and personal data

This actor extracts publicly available data from YouTube. You should ensure your use of the extracted data complies with YouTube's Terms of Service, applicable data protection laws (GDPR, CCPA), and your jurisdiction's regulations regarding web scraping and data processing.

Search results and video information is public content visible to anyone on YouTube.

Support

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the Issues tab or contact us through Apify messaging.